REVIEW AND FUTURE PLANNING

 Basic Business Cents

A Community Performance Improvement Plan for Small Business

MONTH TWELVE: REVIEW AND FUTURE PLANNING

The last month of the Community Performance Improvement activity for small businesses coming together for joint training sessions and applications of lessons learned between the training sessions will be reviewed for what worked and what did not work. The results of improvement efforts within their organizations will be presented to the group, discussed, and recommendations made by fellow attendees. Each organization is different and will have different experiences. By sharing, they can learn from each other without revealing company confidential information and gain new insight on what to do going forward.

Attendees from each organization will in turn, share their Performance Profile results with the class and receive feedback to help in the future. Examples of successes and failures will be helpful to the discussion. 

Plans for future deployment and continued learning will also be shared.

As stated in the first article of this series (July 6, 2011), the return on investment in this program should be huge. Large organizations have experienced real annual savings/project of $50,000 to $3,600,000. If we scale that down to one tenth of that for small companies participating in this Community Performance Improvement activity, and each participating organization undertakes several projects during the year, we begin to get a feel of the positive impact this program will have on the participating companies.

By sharing the cost of two days of training/month for twelve months, considerable savings can be realized and this can often be covered by a grant. The half-day of individual consulting per month for each participating company is then the responsibility of each of the companies.

The benefits of this program are to share the costs of experienced consultants, processes, and material in a manner that will benefit all at a reasonable investment and pay a large return in the improved performance of the participating organizations. Process improvement and innovation have proven to be very effective and necessary to compete successfully and profitably in today’s challenging business world by large organizations and the Community Performance Improvement plan is an effective method to bring the same proven techniques to small organizations.

The Chief Executive Officer of Midway USA, winner of the 2009 Baldrige Award recipient, stated, “If you want sustainability in an organization, and you want to go from great to really great, you’ve got to have some kind of model…and Baldrige is that model. Our sales are up over 20 per cent per year over the last five years. Our profits are up over 40 per cent for that same time. Customer and employee satisfaction are at an all time high and it’s all because of our efforts in engaging the Baldrige Criteria.”

The Community Performance Improvement Plan makes it possible for you to have a similar experience with your organization.